Page 12 of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

You have already blessed me,she said.With the greatest gift a mortal can have. I accept my burden. It is for the best of my people. Forgive my idle thoughts earlier.

As you wish…the distant spirit said.Then…could you give…us a boon?

Yumi looked up. That…never happened in the stories.

How?she asked.

We are bound. Trapped.

She glanced toward the corner of the room, where a spirit light—the spheres touching to turn the light off for sleep—lay on a counter. It was identical to those she’d made earlier today. One light sphere, one dark. Trapped?

No,the spirit thought.That is not our prison… We…have a more terrible…existence. Can you free us? Will you…try? There is one who can help you.

Spirits in trouble? She didn’t know what she could do, but it was her duty to see them cared for. Her life was to serve. She was the yoki-hijo. The girl of commanding primal spirits.

Yes,she said, bowing her head again.Tell me what you need, and I will do whatever I can.

Please,it said.Free. Us.

All went black.

Painter wound throughthe next set of streets, tracking the nightmare as the rain tapped him on the head. The trail was difficult to follow; the dark wisps seemed to vanish in the haze. He backtracked twice as the streets grew narrower, winding through the huddled tenements of the city’s outer rings.

The hion lines overhead here were as thin as twine, barely giving him enough light to see by. It got so bad that he eventually decided he’d lost the trail and turned to go home, passing a slit of a window he’d neglected to glance through earlier.

He checked it this time and found the nightmare inside, crouched at the head of a bed.

The room was lit by a faint line of teal hion tracing the ceiling, making shadows of the room’s meager furniture and frameless mattress, which held three figures: parents the nightmare had ignored, and a child who made for more…tender prey.

The little boy was perhaps four. He huddled on his side, eyessqueezed shut, holding to a worn pillow that had eyes sewn on it—a poorer family’s approximation of a stuffed toy. Treasured regardless.

The nightmare was tall enough that it had to bend over, or its head would have hit the ceiling. A sinuous, boneless neck. A body with lupine features, legs that bent the wrong way, a face with a snout. With a sense of dread, Painter realized why this one had been so difficult to track. Virtually no smoke rose from its body. Most telling, it hadeyes. Bone white as if drawn in chalk, but as deep as sockets in a skull.

This nightmare barely dripped darkness from its face. It was almost fullystable. No longer formless. No longer aimless.

No longer harmless.

This thing must have been incredibly crafty to have escaped notice during so many trips to the city. It took around ten feedings for a nightmare to coalesce to this level. Only a few more, and it would be fully solid. Painter stepped backward, trembling. It already had substance. Things like this could…couldslaughterhundreds. The entire city of Futinoro had been destroyed by stable nightmares only thirty years earlier.

This was above his pay grade. Quite literally. There was an entire specialized division of painters tasked with stopping stable nightmares. They traveled the land, going to towns where one was spotted.

The sound of a small sniffle broke through Painter’s panic. He ripped his eyes from the nightmare to look at the bed, where the child—trembling—had squeezed his eyes closed even tighter.

The child was awake.

At this stage, the nightmare could feed on conscious terror as easily as it did the formless fear of a dream. It ran clawed fingers across the child’s cheek, trailing streaks of blood from split skin. The gesture was almost tender. And why shouldn’t it be? The child had given the thing shape and substance, ripped directly out of his deepest fears.

Now, the story thus far might have given you an unflattering picture of Painter. And yes, much of that picture is justified. Many of his problems in life were his own fault—and rather than trying to fix them, he alternated between comfortable self-delusion and pointless self-pity.

But you should also know that right then—before the nightmare saw him—he could have easily slipped away into the night. He could have reported this to the foreman, who would have sent for the Dreamwatch. Most painters would have done just that.

Instead, our painter reached for his supplies.

Too much noise. Too much noise!he thought as he slapped his bag onto the pavement and scrambled for a canvas. He couldn’t wake the parents. If anyone started screaming, the stable nightmarewouldattack and peoplewoulddie.

Calm. Calm. Don’t feed it.

His training barely held as, trembling, he spilled out canvas, brush, and paints. He glanced up.

---